


The Right Call

by kaesaria



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Angst, Consent Issues, First Time, Frustration, M/M, Prison-Era, Tension, Violence, mentions of previous abuse, the boys both suck at communicating
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-10
Updated: 2016-02-22
Packaged: 2018-04-13 22:17:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4539450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaesaria/pseuds/kaesaria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rick carries everyone.  Sometimes he needs someone to carry him, whether he knows it or not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The prison was supposed to be a safe haven.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Takes place around episode 3x05, when Rick is still grieving hard over recent losses and starting to lose his mind a little.

The first time Daryl comes to him is after Lori—

After everything is gone.  All he’d done, held onto, hoped for… all gone in the blink of an eye.

The prison was supposed to be a safe haven.  Rick had refused to let himself think much beyond getting the prison cleared, getting the group behind the sheltering walls of Cellblock C, getting his family cleaned up and fed and  _safe_.

After, Rick had thought vaguely, was when he would talk to Lori, when he’d tell her he was sorry.  He’d spend time with Carl, teach him things a father should—things that didn’t involve blood.  After, they would have time to focus on the things that mattered.  They’d all get to know each other again, away from the horrors.  They’d be a family again.  They’d start to heal.

But nothing matters anymore because it turns out there is no after.  There’s just more terror and gore and death and—

Rick tenses suddenly at a noise, his hand automatically clenches around the screwdriver he’d been gripping lightly in his lap; he feels his legs start to coil under him, ready to spring, to attack—

Then he sees that it’s a man, not a walker.  It’s Daryl coming, warily, into the boiler room where Rick is sitting on the cold concrete floor, leaned up against one of the silent generators.  It’s dark in here, and Rick is pretty sure Daryl can’t see his face from where he is.

Rick watches Daryl approach, slowly.  It’s exactly the way he’s seen the man approach the animals they’d hunted in the past weeks—the ones that were wounded, probably fatally, but not quite dead yet.

When he’s close enough to touch, Daryl stops and squints down at him.

“I did another sweep.  This whole area is clear.”  Daryl pauses as if expecting a response.  Rick can’t bring himself to care.

“C’mon back to the cellblock, man.  You need to see your kid.”  A pause.  “Your kids.” 

The man’s voice is gruff—Rick feels himself flinch a little at the words, and Daryl’s expression changes.  He comes down to a crouch in front of Rick.

“C’mon, man.”  His voice is gentler now.  Daryl starts to reach out as if he’s going to try to pull Rick up or something—and Rick pushes the man’s arm away, suddenly pissed.  He probably shoves a little harder than is necessary.  Daryl pulls away from him and leans back on his haunches, surprised. 

The wary look is back on his face.

Rick notices that his own hands are clenched into fists and his arms are pulled protectively against his sides, ready to attack again.  His whole body is tense.  He thinks about how he doesn’t remember what it feels like  _not_  to feel tense all over.  He closes his eyes and puts some effort into relaxing his hands.  The screwdriver drops onto the concrete floor with a resounding clang.  Rick takes a breath.

“Leave me alone.  Get back to the group.”  He’s surprised at how normal his voice sounds. 

Daryl doesn’t move.

“You need to come back, man.  The others—”

Daryl is looking at him with a strange expression; a look Rick’s never seen on the man’s face before.  He looks like he’s—considering something important, weighing options in his mind. It doesn’t make any sense.  Nothing makes sense, but now Daryl looks like he’s come to some kind of grim decision.  The man is making like he’s about to reach towards him again, to pull Rick back into more shit he has to deal with, be _responsible_ for, and suddenly—something in Rick snaps.  The world washes over in red.  The others can fucking take care of themselves for five fucking minutes. 

Rick pushes to his feet, violence on his mind, he’s going to—he’s not sure _what_ exactly he’s going to do, but—

Daryl is too quick for him; the man’s reflexes are fine-tuned to anticipate attack from anything, probably honed by experience from long before walkers ever roamed the earth. 

Daryl has scrambled to his feet and is out of reach of Rick’s shoving arms before they can make contact.  Daryl’s still not leaving, though, and Rick is suddenly filled with gut-wrenching terror that the man will start talking again, will force Rick to face unbearable realities—and before he knows it, Rick finds himself lunging at Daryl, swinging wildly. 

The man jumps back out of the way, but there’s only so much space to dance around between the hulking generators and the metal tables, especially since Daryl’s not trying to fight back, and eventually Rick lands a solid hit on the side of his face.

Daryl’s whole body is swung around by the force of the blow and he stumbles back; catches himself on the side of a table, his arm braced behind him.  Rick stops, watches as Daryl brings his free hand up to wipe at his mouth with the back of his hand, his eyes still warily on Rick.  There’s a dark smear of blood across Daryl’s jaw now.

“Rick,” Daryl is speaking slowly, deliberately.  He talks the way a man who doesn’t talk much does: like he fully expects people to stop and listen when he opens his mouth.  “Rick, your boy needs you to pull your shit together and—”

Daryl’s still talking, but Rick can’t listen.  He can’t think about Carl now.  Rick can’t  _think_.

Why won’t the man just leave him the fuck alone?  Rick lurches towards him again, almost convulsively; he needs to  _shut Daryl up_.  Daryl immediately brings his arm up to shield his face from another blow.  Rick sees that coming, though, and uses Daryl’s distraction to aim lower, leveling his punch at the man’s unprotected flank instead.  Rick’s fist lands with a sickening thud and Daryl doubles over with a grunt.  After a few seconds of hoarse gasping, he squints up at Rick, hunched protectively over his injured midsection.  That weirdly  _considering_  expression is on Daryl’s face again, but he’s still not fighting back and he’s still not leaving. 

Rick is terrified that Daryl will start talking again, that he’ll say things Rick will need to think about, take charge of, _fix_ —and  _he can’t_.  Daryl straightens up some and starts to raise his hands, slowly, placating; he starts to open his mouth—

Rick throws his entire body at the man, hands aiming for Daryl’s throat.

Daryl wasn’t expecting that, and the force of Rick’s body knocks them both down to the floor; pushing the table back in the process.  Its metal feet make a nerve-chilling screech against the concrete floor. 

And now Rick is on top of Daryl, his hands still aimed at the man’s throat—he needs, he  _needs_  to choke the words back before they can get out—and Daryl is finally starting to put up something of a struggle. 

Rick’s relieved.  At last, there’s finally something to fight, something  _living_  that he can  _hurt_ —

Daryl is thrashing under him now, the man’s hands are clenched on Rick’s wrists, nails digging into his skin, trying to keep Rick’s hands away from his throat, and at the same time Daryl is trying to knee up at him, scrambling with his legs to try to dislodge Rick, to push him off.  Rick can’t have that. 

He drops his full weight down on top of Daryl, pushes his own knees down to bracket the man’s legs and keep them pinned.  His hips are flush against Daryl’s now and the man squirms, bucks, trying to shove him off.  Rick wrenches one of his wrists free of Daryl’s frantic grip and leans up to punch Daryl across the face, once.  Daryl’s head snaps to the side and he stops struggling for a second, stunned.

Rick uses the man’s distraction to better secure his hold; he pushes Daryl’s arms down and pins them against the floor, using his own elbows to hold the man down.  Daryl starts struggling again.  His hands are free but he can’t do much other than claw some at Rick’s sides since he can’t move his upper arms.  He’s saying something that sounds like  _wait_  and  _let me up_ —but Rick can’t bring himself to listen.  He settles more of his weight down onto his elbows.  He can feel Daryl’s biceps strain under the pressure, and then give a little as Rick’s elbows dig further into his flesh.  Daryl grunts in pain and goes still for a beat.  Then, suddenly, the man’s eyes widen and he starts to struggle anew, even more frantically than before; now he’s trying to twist his body to slide out from under Rick—

But Daryl can’t do much other than squirm uselessly.  Rick’s got him completely pinned down now and the few extra pounds Rick’s got on the man are making a difference.

Now that he’s got Daryl immobile, Rick moves to get his hands around the man’s throat again, and—

And that’s when his brain finally catches up with what’s happening.

Rick’s body is flush against Daryl’s; he can feel every inch of the man underneath him.  He can feel the man’s hot, harsh breath rasping close to his ear, loud in the otherwise silent room.

And he can feel where he’s rock hard, his hips digging into Daryl’s.

Rick freezes, shocked. 

 _What the fuck is he doing?_   He wonders for a second, frantically, if Daryl has realized what’s happening—but that’s a stupid thought, of course the man can feel Rick’s cock pressed hard against him, there’s nothing but the flimsy barrier of a couple layers of fabric between them.  It’s probably more than half the reason why Daryl’s struggles had suddenly taken on a more desperate note.

Rick realizes, then, that Daryl isn’t struggling anymore.  There’s no movement in the body underneath him, frantic or otherwise.  Rick pulls his head up and looks down at Daryl; he feels like he’s actually seeing the man for the first time since he’d come into the boiler room.

Daryl’s watching him, steadily.  His face is unreadable. 

Then, slowly, deliberately, Daryl turns his face to the side; he slides his gaze away from Rick and towards the emptiness at the far end of the boiler room.  His body is still taut and immobile under Rick’s. 

Apparently, Daryl has had enough of Rick’s pathetic bullshit.

Numbly, Rick starts to move off of the other man, shifts his legs first so that he’s no longer pinning Daryl’s down.  He’s about to pull his upper body off—desperately trying to think what the  _fuck_  he should do now, one other fucking mistake to deal with, on top of everything else, when—

Rick feels something land on his hip; a soft pressure, almost insubstantial through the cloth of his pants.  It’s Daryl’s hand, he realizes.  The man had stopped trying to push him off, and now he’s moved his hand to rest on Rick’s left hip, fingers curled just a little, almost like—like he’s holding him there.  Then Rick feels Daryl’s hips shift, minutely, under him. 

Rick’s eyes immediately snap back to Daryl’s face and at the same time his hips automatically thrust down, his body reacting unconsciously before his mind can even begin to process it.  Daryl’s still got his face averted; Rick can’t see the man’s expression, but—Rick doesn’t care anymore.  Suddenly, blindingly, everything in Rick is focused on the heat between his legs; he can practically feel all the blood and everything else in him rush to that focal point, to that beautifully gratifying pressure.  He thrusts his hips down, again, grinds down on the solid warmth underneath him.  He hears Daryl grunt, softly.

Vaguely, through the urgent haze of pleasure, he’s aware of a weak, nagging, still-sane corner of his brain telling him to stop, that this is a bad idea—

But he shuts down that part of his brain before it can get through, no mercy; kills it with the hard thrust of a spike through the eye socket; the same way he kills the walkers.  He can’t think.  He  _won’t_  think.  Not now, not in this second when he finally feels something good, when he finally feels  _something_.

He’s still grinding down on Daryl.  The pressure is delicious.  Rick shifts his arms a little to get better leverage, moves his elbows so that he’s not pressing them down directly into Daryl’s muscles, and he hears the man let out a gasp of—relief?  Pleasure?  Rick’s not sure, but he  _is_  pretty sure that Daryl could get out from under him now, if he wanted; that he could shove Rick off and punch him in the face, if he wanted.

Daryl still doesn’t move, still doesn’t look at him.  His hand is still on Rick’s hip.

It’s all the permission Rick needs.

Rick lowers his head, braces himself better on his arms and starts to thrust up against Daryl’s body with purpose.  It’s unrefined, animalistic rutting; he can feel the buttons of his pants digging into his skin with each thrust, the concrete is hard and cold under his knees, and he has to press crudely against Daryl, at an awkward angle, to get the pressure he needs—

But, it feels amazing. 

Daryl is warm and solid and alive underneath him.  God, it’d been so long, months and months of fear and no human contact; nothing since those few stolen moments at the farm with Lori—

Rick closes his eyes and pushes harder, digging his hips in with each thrust.  He listens to Daryl’s breaths; they sound like they’re being pushed out of him, harsh and in sync with the jolting motions of Rick’s body above him.

And, Rick just— _feels_ , he doesn’t think, his mind is wonderfully empty, all he knows is the blissful pressure building in his lower belly; it coils tighter and Rick thrusts harder, drives himself down even more forcefully against the warm, unresisting body under him.  It feels so good; he’s almost there, he just needs—just a little more—

Rick feels Daryl’s grip tighten, just then, at his hip and he feels the body underneath him push up, hard, once, twice—and, he’s—there,  _there_.  Rick sucks in a lungful of air and grinds his hips down roughly, once more, and holds there as the final waves of pleasure overtake him.  He can hear himself gasping, loudly.  It almost sounds like he’s sobbing.

This,  _this_  is what he needed.

His feels his body tremble a few times, after, the soft crests of aftershocks rocking his body.  His mind is wonderfully, blissfully empty.  He collapses on the warmth underneath him and closes his eyes, breathes.  Lets himself enjoy the silence in his head, just for a moment.

~

When he comes back to himself, he can feel the uncomfortable, sticky mess inside his pants.

He’s still lying on top of Daryl; his forehead is pressed against the side of Daryl’s neck, right above the man’s left shoulder.  He’s half-braced on his upper arms; his body is still more or less pinning Daryl down.  A distant, uneasy feeling starts to coil in the pit of Rick’s stomach.  He lifts his head to look down at the other man.

Daryl’s still got his head turned, his face twisted to the side away from where Rick had been resting his head.  Rick can’t see his expression.  The man’s eyes are closed and he’s panting a little, quietly.  His body is tense underneath Rick’s.

Rick moves his hips, cautiously, trying to gauge if the other man had gotten off, too.  He doesn’t feel any hardness underneath him.  But, then again—had Daryl even gotten hard?  Rick realizes, with a sick clench in his gut, that he hadn’t been paying attention.

Daryl shifts slightly at the movement above him.  Rick watches, warily, as Daryl’s eyes crack open and flick towards him in that familiar, sidelong way, but man doesn’t fully turn his head. 

Then Rick feels a pressure on his left hip and he realizes that Daryl had kept his hand there through—all of it.  He’s pushing at Rick now, though—pushing him away.

“Get off me, man.”  The voice is hoarse.

Rick immediately rolls off of Daryl and slides his body away, to the right.

Now they’re both lying on their backs, a handbreadth of space between them.  Rick stares up at the dirty ceiling.  He feels himself shiver as the cold of the concrete floor seeps up through his clothes.  Daryl must be freezing, Rick thinks, dimly, he must be—

Rick opens his mouth.  Closes it.  He has no fucking idea what to do next.  What the fuck do you say to the man that you’d just—?  What the fuck  _had_  he just done?

He stiffens at a slight movement at the corner of his eye, feels himself bracing for—God only knows what.  A tense, interminable beat, then—

He feels Daryl’s hand, the one that hadn’t touched him before, come down on his thigh, softly.  It’s warm.  Daryl rests it there for a second, squeezes, once, then pulls his hand away and starts to sit up.  Rick lets out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.

He watches as Daryl pushes himself up to a sitting position.  The man rubs his biceps where Rick had been pressing him down, wincing a little.  Rick swallows.  Tries not to think about bruises in the shape of elbows.

Daryl gets to his feet and stretches; Rick can hear the man’s back crack.   Then Daryl looks down at him, steadily, and reaches out to offer Rick a hand.

“C’mon back to the cellblock, man.”

Rick closes his eyes briefly, takes a deep breath, and opens them.  He feels the thoughts, the fears, the responsibilities, all slide back into his head and start to swirl around again.  The brain reanimates.

Rick takes Daryl’s hand and pulls himself up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Feedback is highly appreciated!


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The cell is close enough that Rick could touch Daryl if he leaned out and reached with his hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Takes place after episode 3x10. Rick has just agreed to let Merle stay on, and Daryl is feeling grateful.

Rick is drowning.

No.  He’s in a sinking paddleboat, in the middle of a red ocean, bailing bucketloads as fast as he can, but the blood is coming in faster than he can get it out—there are holes, holes everywhere and he’s running out of things to plug them with.  He reaches down to push his hand against a crack to quell the gush, but the blood level is too high now; it’s splashing against his face, he can’t breathe, he can’t—

Rick wakes up, gasping.  For one glorious moment, all he can feel is relief.

Then, as always, life rears its putrid, resurrected head.  Rick really is drowning, he remembers, but it’s not in blood—it’s the dead that engulf him, the walkers and the corpses and the ghosts.

Years ago, back when he was still in the academy, training for a position at the sheriff’s office, Rick had had to sit through extensive training on how to handle victims of trauma.  There was a ton of snotty, academic bullshit that he had to be familiar with—questionnaires and stress tests and charts that had to be memorized, all supposed to prepare Georgia law enforcement to deal with people who had been pushed to the edge, or beyond.   There was one particular scale, Rick remembers, that was made up of a tidy list of “life-changing events”, each assigned a weight, which supposedly added up to a quantitative score of exactly how off the rocker a person had become. 

Now, in his mind’s eye, Rick can see the chart that had been handed around: a neat row of possible human tragedies listed alongside their corresponding point scores.

_Death_ _of a spouse—100 points.  Personal injury or illness—53 points._

Rick wonders, tiredly, where on the scale he would score now. 

_Gain_ _of a new family member—39 points.  Death of a close friend—46 points.  Change in responsibilities at work—29 points.  Change in living conditions—25 points._

How far off the scale, might be a better question.

Rick sighs, rubs his face.  Leaning over the side of his bunk, he can see out the high windows of the cellblock.  It’s still dark outside.  It’s a clear night and the nearly-full moon hangs low in the sky, casting its pale, bluish light across the cellblock floor.  He can’t have been asleep for more than a couple of hours.  He should be happy to have slept for that long, he figures, nightmares notwithstanding.  Rick can’t remember the last time he slept through the night.  He can’t remember what it is to feel rested.

Rick can hear the steady fall of soft footsteps pacing the balcony outside his cell.  It’s Daryl, he realizes, on watch.   _Change or uncertainty in sexual situation—39 points_ , Rick’s memory helpfully supplies.

He hears Daryl turn at the end of the hallway, and now the footsteps are coming back towards him.  Rick’s cell is at the far end of the second level, as apart as he can be from the others who all are clustered into a group of cells on the lower floor at the opposite end of the cellblock.  He’s probably the only one who can hear Daryl.  Sound doesn’t carry nearly as well through the concrete hallways as one would think.

Rick sits up, swings his legs over the side of the bunk and leans over them, resting his elbows on his knees, letting his head hang.  Sleep is not coming back anytime soon.  He listens as Daryl’s footsteps come closer and slow down as they approach Rick’s cell.  Rick looks up when the sound stops; he can see Daryl’s silhouette outside his cell, facing him, stark against the moonlight coming in through the windows outside.  Daryl’s got his crossbow in hand.

The man can probably see Rick better than Rick can see him, with the light at his back.  Silence for a moment, then Daryl speaks.

“Sounded rough,” he says, quietly, “Was gonna wake you, pretty soon.”

“Yeah, well,” Rick rubs his face again, tiredly, “Can’t seem to shake the nightmares.”  He pauses, but Daryl doesn’t say anything.

“I can’t get back to sleep, anyway,” Rick continues, resigned, “You get some rest.  I’ll take over.”  Rick starts to get up, but stops, surprised, when Daryl moves to enter the cell. 

Rick watches as Daryl puts his crossbow down, carefully, placing it near the bars at the cell’s entrance.  Then Daryl steps fully inside and leans back against the wall opposite Rick’s bunk.  It’s funny how the man can look sprawled, even when he’s standing up.

“No,” Daryl says, “It’s Glenn up next.  Still got another half hour.”

Rick sits back in his bunk and looks up at the other man.  The cell is close enough that Rick could touch Daryl if he leaned out and reached with his hand.  Now, suddenly, the enclosed space feels claustrophobic—far too small for two grown men.  He imagines, for a second, what it must have been like for the men who occupied this tiny space together, day after day, before the world went to hell.

“Listen, since you’re up,” Daryl is saying, “I wanted to—,” he pauses, and Rick can see the shift of muscles at his throat as Daryl swallows, once, before continuing, “I appreciate what you did.  For Merle.”

Rick looks up, surprised.  He’s not sure what the man’s expecting—it’s not like Daryl to bring up a subject once it’s closed. 

“Well, like I said before,” Rick replies, cautiously, “It’s on you.”

Daryl doesn’t say anything for a beat, just looks at him.  Then, abruptly, he pushes off the wall and moves towards the bunk.  Rick feels himself tense for danger, automatically; he feels his heartbeat speed up.  The adrenaline is on a hair-trigger these days.  Daryl steps close.  His legs are practically touching Rick’s knees; he’s near enough that Rick can feel the heat emanating from the man’s body.

Rick feels a trickle of interest start to pool low in his belly, out of nowhere, right alongside the thread of unease.

They hadn’t talked about what had happened in the boiler room.  Between the Governor and the ghosts and all the other crazy shit that had happened over the past few weeks, it hadn’t exactly come up in conversation.  After a while, Rick had half started to think that he’d imagined the whole encounter, along with the phone calls and Lori and every other fucking thing in his crazy head.

Daryl’s close enough now that Rick can see his face clearly, even in the dim light.  The man is squinting down at him in that way he does.

“It’s on me.  I know.”  There’s a strange quality to his voice, and Rick’s unease grows stronger.

Rick opens his mouth—but before he can get anything out, Daryl abruptly drops to his knees in front of him and the man’s hand is between Rick’s legs, quicker than thought.  His cock goes from half-interested to full mast between one breath and the next.  Apparently adrenaline isn’t the only thing on a hair-trigger.

Rick jerks back, alarmed.   

“What are you doing?  I don’t—”

“Nothing, man,” Daryl's voice is low, placating.  He had pulled away at Rick’s reaction and now he’s sitting back on his haunches, still on his knees in front of the bunk.  Daryl’s face is in shadow again and Rick can’t make out the man’s expression.  “You can’t sleep, and I got a half hour.  Ain’t nothing happening out there; might as well do something useful in here.”

He reaches towards Rick again, more slowly, with both hands this time.

“Something use-useful,” Rick repeats, dazed, and his voice stutters a little as he feels Daryl’s hand on his cock again, warm and heavy.  Daryl is squeezing him there now, rhythmically, through the sweatpants Rick wears to bed.  It feels amazing, and Rick feels himself harden even more, feels his legs slide apart, unconsciously, making more room for the man kneeling in front of him.  Then Daryl does something with his thumb and Rick’s hips thrust up against Daryl’s hands, involuntarily.  He sucks in a startled breath.  But—

There’s a nagging part of his mind that’s saying there’s something wrong here, something Daryl’s not saying or that Rick’s not seeing, some reason why he should stop this, and if Daryl would get his hands off him for a second Rick would be able to wrap his head around it.

“Wait, I—”  Rick makes a half-hearted attempt to pull away, but now Daryl has pushed Rick’s pants out of the way and suddenly there is glorious skin-to-skin contact.  Rick’s entire being constricts to the feel of Daryl’s hands on his cock, to that delicious sensation.

Rick hears himself groan. 

His body remembers Daryl, remembers the scent, the heat, the blissful feeling of that body against his with just the right pressure in just the right places—

 _Pressure._   His mind remembers, late, but with sudden, icy clarity, the feel of Daryl’s muscles straining, pinned under him; he remembers the long-sleeved shirts Daryl had worn for weeks afterward, in the heat of Georgia in July.

With herculean effort, Rick grabs Daryl’s wrists and pulls the man’s hands off of him.

“Daryl,” he makes himself grit out, “this isn’t what I want.”

The hands go still, and Rick can feel the man tense up, a little, but Daryl doesn’t pull away or get up.  He’s looking up at Rick now, his face in shadow again. 

Rick’s cock is still jutting out between them with the waistband of his sweats tucked underneath his balls; Daryl must have done that at some point.  Now Rick feels exposed and kind of ridiculous.  Belatedly, he realizes he’s still holding Daryl’s wrists, gripping them tightly enough to hurt, probably, and he lets go.

He thinks Daryl will pull his hands away; but instead, the man lets them fall, heavy, on Rick’s thighs.  Daryl’s thumb brushes against the side of Rick’s cock again, electric.  Rick should pull back and fix his clothes now, he knows, but he’d have to push Daryl away again to do that, and—it seems rude, somehow.  He hesitates for a beat, frozen in awkward indecision. Then—

“S’alright,” Daryl says, “I got you.”

And before Rick can respond to that, before he can even process what the man has said, Daryl is leaning in close and—Rick stares, shocked, as Daryl takes Rick’s cock into his mouth.

Rick’s brain stutters to a hard stop.

Then it’s just warm, glorious, wet heat and— _oh_.  Rick groans, his head fall back.  He feels his hands clench on the bed at his sides.

“ _God—_ ” 

Rick gives up.  He’s going to hell.

Daryl’s mouth is as skilled as his hands.  There’s warm, steady suction and the firm pressure of Daryl’s tongue moving against the sensitive underside—.  Rick slumps back until his shoulders hit the wall behind the bunk, keeps his gaze fixed on Daryl, rapt, as the man moves over Rick’s cock.  There’s a ray of moonlight hitting the side of Daryl’s face and neck and Rick can see Daryl’s mouth, his lips glistening where they stretch around him, wet and obscene.  Rick feels his cock jerk against Daryl’s tongue at the image and he watches the ripple of the man’s throat as he swallows around him.  Daryl keeps his neck bent; Rick can’t see his eyes.

Daryl clearly knows what he’s doing.  His movements are practiced and sure.  He gives head like someone who’s done it before, many times; and the part of Rick’s brain that’s still functioning is vaguely shocked at this realization.  It seems so—out of character, for Daryl, somehow.

Daryl doesn’t tease or draw it out, but he doesn’t rush, either.  The pleasure flows through Rick in waves, in perfect sync with the cadence of Daryl’s sucking.  The man’s hands are a steadying weight on Rick’s thighs, holding them apart.  Daryl’s head stays tucked down, intent on his task.  Rick keeps his hands on the bed.  He’s not sure if he’s allowed to touch; doesn’t trust himself not to if he moves them.

Rick closes his eyes and gives himself over to the sensation.  He listens to the small, delicious, slurping noises coming from Daryl and tries to stifle his own gasps and groans as much as he can.

Rick’s orgasm builds quickly.  He feels the tightening at the back of his balls and he barely has time to touch the side of Daryl’s head in warning before he comes.  Rick tries to do the polite thing and pull away, but Daryl tightens his grip on Rick’s thighs and lowers his head, takes Rick deeper in his mouth. 

Rick can’t help himself then; he hunches up to curl around himself and both his hands come up to rest on Daryl’s head, his fingers threading through the man’s hair.  He forces himself to keep his hands loose, doesn’t let himself grip and hold Daryl’s down, the way he wants.  Then, it’s all Rick can do to keep his hips still, to keep himself from thrusting up into that glorious mouth as Daryl sucks him through the end—through the rolling crests of pleasure and that glorious emptiness of mind.  He can feel Daryl swallowing around him through the aftershocks until he’s done, emptied of everything.

When it’s over, Rick collapses back.  He can hear himself panting.  His hands slide out of Daryl’s hair as the man pulls back.

After a few hazy moments, Rick becomes aware of a soft noise and pushes himself up on one elbow to look down at Daryl.  The man is still kneeling in front of the bunk and his left hand is still gripping Rick’s thigh, but his other hand is busy between his own legs. 

When his eyes adjust, Rick sees that Daryl is hard, the head of his cock wet and gleaming in the moonlight—Rick feels a rush of unexpected relief at this—and that the man is jerking himself with singular focus. 

Rick reaches down, intending to help, but Daryl flinches back, unaccountably; he turns his upper body half away from Rick, shoulders hunching.  At the same time, the fingers of Daryl’s left hand dig into Rick’s thigh, both a warning and a barrier keeping Rick back at arm’s length.  Rick pulls back on the bunk, a little stung, but—it’s Daryl’s choice, after all, how he wants to get off. 

Rick settles back, leaning on his elbow, and watches as Daryl strokes himself to completion.  Daryl is quiet at the end—he just shudders, hard, and gasps a few times, still huddled over himself.

After, Daryl stays in position, breathing deeply, his head still down.  Rick thinks that the man might have forgotten about him for the moment.  Rick doesn’t mind.  It’s nice, being here with Daryl, still floating in the hazy afterglow of shared pleasure.  It feels—peaceful; a thing rare and precious in Rick’s convoluted life.

Idly, and without any conscious intent, Rick puts his hand over Daryl’s where it’s resting on Rick’s thigh and strokes once, softly, with his thumb.  Daryl’s reaction is immediate; the man’s head jerks up and he snatches his hand away as if something had burned him.

Rick freezes and looks at Daryl, bewildered.  His hand is resting on his own thigh now, where it’s still warm and the fabric a little damp with sweat from where Daryl had been clutching it.

Daryl’s in the light now, still kneeling in front of the bunk, but he’s pulled himself back as far as he can without actually getting up and moving.  The man is tense again, Rick sees, his body all angles and taut lines.   

“I’m sorry,” Rick says, reflexively; then he doesn’t know why he said it.

Daryl doesn’t respond.  He looks kind of embarrassed now, and—exposed, somehow.  Rick can see the man’s eyes sliding back and forth, looking everywhere except at Rick’s face.  His gaze finally lands on Rick’s cock, which is still out, Rick realizes, belatedly—and half hard with renewed interest from watching Daryl jerk off.  Rick swallows and wishes he had pulled up his pants.

“You wanna go again?” Daryl asks, his voice low.  He’s finally looking at Rick, but he’s shifted his body so that his face is in shadow again.  The man is doing that on purpose, Rick realizes suddenly, with a distant, sinking feeling—Daryl is avoiding him by purposefully leaning into the darkness.

“No,” Rick says, and the word rings harshly across the quiet cell; he sees Daryl flinch backward, minutely, at the sound of it. 

Rick lets out a breath, then pushes himself back to sit up straighter on the bunk, inserting more breathing space between himself and Daryl.  He fixes his pants and feels a little better.  Rick softens his voice, tries to put some lightness in it, before continuing, “I probably couldn’t, even if I wanted to.”

“Alright,” Daryl agrees, almost too quickly.  There’s a vague note of something like— _relief_  in his voice, and Rick feels himself start to tense up again, a version of the earlier unease slithering back into his gut, slimy and unwanted.  Then Daryl says, hastily, half-apologetically, “We don’t got time for it, anyway.”

Rick lowers his head and reaches back to rub at a sudden cord of tension at the base of his neck; he doesn't say anything. 

It’s impossible to respond, he reasons, grimly, to all the unsaid things that he and Daryl leave swirling in the darkness between them.  The silence stretches for a long moment, then he thinks he hears Daryl sigh—but the sound is so quiet that he might have imagined it.

“Anyway,” Daryl says, finally, “I just came by to—y’know.  Thank you.”

Rick glances up again and watches, mildly irritated, as the man carefully wipes his hand off on the side of Rick’s bunk.  Then Daryl tucks himself back into his pants, efficiently, and stands up. 

“I’m gonna get Glenn up,” he says, already moving towards the lighter gloom of the cellblock outside.  Then Daryl pauses, unexpectedly, and turns back towards Rick, like he’s about to say something more.

Rick lifts his head up to look at the man; he carefully doesn’t move from where he’s seated on the bunk, his elbows resting on his thighs.  He notes, distantly, that he’s almost holding his breath, braced in expectation of—something; Rick doesn’t know what, exactly. 

But Daryl just swallows, after a beat, and shifts his gaze away.  Rick lowers his head back down and presses his fingers at that tense place at his nape, lets the air out of his lungs.

He listens as Daryl picks up his crossbow and leaves, quiet like a shadow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you leave feedback, I will love you forever!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daryl doesn’t tell him to fuck off, so Rick must have been right, after all, thinking that he might want some company.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Takes place immediately after episode 3x15. Daryl is grieving, and Rick tries to help.

He finds Daryl out by the fence near the west end of the yard. 

It takes a while because this corner of the yard isn’t easily visible from any of the accessible windows of the prison.  It’s hard to see even from the watchtower; the hulking prison building blocks direct sightlines to this area.

Daryl is sitting on an old truck tire with his back to the prison.  The man’s shoulders are set in a tight, angry line, and his head is down.  He’s sitting faced towards the walkers that are growling and clawing ineffectually at the fence a few yards ahead of him; a clump of stragglers that had broken away from the main crowd near the front gate.  Daryl doesn’t seem to hear them.

Rick hesitates a little ways off; he knows Daryl came out here to be alone.  But then again, being alone at a time like this might not be the best idea—as Rick knows, all too well.

He moves forward a few more steps and thinks about clearing his throat or something, but—

Daryl talks before Rick can figure out what to say, or work up the nerve to say it.

“Quit creepin’ around and come here if you’re going to.”  Daryl doesn’t bother to look up as he talks.  He’s working on something, Rick sees now; the man’s eyes and hands are focused at his lap.

Rick walks the rest of the distance and gingerly sits down next to Daryl on the tire.  He leans forward to pick up a straw of dead grass and starts to twist it, idly, between his fingers.  The tire is more than big enough for the two of them; and Rick wonders, absently, how something like this could’ve gotten into the prison yard, anyway.  There aren’t any trucks in here big enough to need a tire like this. 

“How’d you know it was me?” Rick asks, after a moment, thoughtfully.  He’s never been good at this kind of thing.

Daryl shrugs, still not looking up, and then says, “Who the fuck else ever gave a shit about Merle and me?”

Rick glances up from his hands and looks out towards the walkers, considering.  It’s true, he supposes; no one else in the group had ever even pretended to care about Merle’s well-being, even before the whole mess with the Governor.  Honestly, Rick hadn’t cared much about Merle either—outside of how the man might sway Daryl’s loyalties—but he guesses this isn’t the best time to come clean on that.  Compared to how the rest of the group had always treated Daryl’s brother, he guesses his own half-assed sense of honor had made Rick stand out like a knight in shining armor.  Rick thinks about the paltry handful of times he’d backed Daryl up in regards to Merle.

He thinks about how Daryl gives so much to the group, and how he’s content with so little in return.

Rick feels a sudden need to move.  He stands up and goes to the fence, pulling out his knife.  He puts the walkers down swiftly, automatically, one after another; the routine of killing them so ingrained in him by now that it doesn’t feel like any more effort than pulling up weeds in a garden. 

When it’s done, he crouches to wipe his blade off on the grass.

Their growling was annoying Rick, vaguely, before; but now the air seems unnaturally silent without the background noise.  Rick thinks about that, for a second: about what constitutes natural and unnatural these days. 

Then he gets up and goes back to Daryl.

Rick drops down to the ground in front of Daryl’s tire and settles himself facing the other man, sitting with his legs bent in front of him and his arms resting on his knees, casually.  Rick couldn’t see Daryl’s face from where he’d sat on the tire, before; but from here he can.  Daryl squints down at him, briefly, and then goes back to his work. 

The late afternoon sun bathes everything in a dusky orange glow; casting long, dark shadows and stark highlights across the high grass of the untended prison yard.  Lori had used to dabble in photography, back before the end of the world, and suddenly Rick remembers how she used to talk about the subtle qualities of light, how a summer evening was the best time to capture the most dramatic events.  Rick has to close his eyes for a second.

Daryl doesn’t tell him to fuck off, so Rick figures he must have been right, after all, in thinking that the man might want some company. 

It’s not every day a man loses a brother.

Now that he’s closer, Rick can see that Daryl’s working on a new arrow.  His crossbow is close by, as usual, leaned up against the side of the tire near the man’s feet.  Rick watches for a while, quietly, as Daryl expertly shaves a bit here and whittles a bit there until what starts out as a knobby little branch begins looking more and more like one of the fiberglass shafts that Daryl hoards whenever they hit a sporting goods store during a run.

Rick has gone through wilderness survival courses in the past, during his time at the Academy; he knows firsthand how difficult it is to whittle a piece of wood precisely enough do anything useful with.  So he recognizes that what Daryl is doing now, carving a broken branch into something so straight and exact that it’ll fly smoothly and accurately out of a crossbow, takes a truly astonishing amount of skill.  In another life, Daryl could’ve been an artist.

“Where’d you learn to do that?” Rick hears himself asking, “Who taught you?”  He’s surprised at the sound of his own voice, loud after the long silence.

Daryl’s hands still for a second, and he throws Rick a quick, inscrutable look.

“My brother,” Daryl says, after a beat.  He goes back to shaving the edge of his arrow.

Rick is silent.  He can’t think of anything to say just then that won’t sound trite, but it turns out it doesn’t matter because—after a minute of quiet scraping, Daryl starts talking again.  The man’s voice is low and kind of intense, like he doesn’t really want to be speaking but can’t help himself.

“There wasn’t ever enough food when we were kids,” Daryl says, “Pa was gone half the time, either avoiding the law or off chasing tail or whatever the fuck else.  After Ma passed, he’d just disappear, leave me and Merle alone for weeks at a time.”  He pauses, frowns down at his arrow for a moment before continuing, “I didn’t mind, though.  It was better than when he was around, getting shitfaced on moonshine and beating on Merle and me for the fun of it.” 

Rick doesn’t say anything.  It makes him angry, in remote kind of way, but he’s heard too many stories like this to be surprised much.  It’s the kind of thing you get to know intimately, being a deputy sheriff in rural Georgia.

“Merle was too young to get a job and not particularly inclined in that direction anyway, so we never had money for food or anything else.”  Daryl glances up and half-smirks, grimly, at some distant memory, then says, “Pa didn’t believe in handouts, either.  Didn’t sit right with his true blue American pride.  He’d rather see his sons starve rather than take charity to fill our bellies.”

Daryl falls silent, and Rick wonders if he’s waiting for some kind of response.  But then—

“Pa always said we might be trash, but we were still better than the fucks who sat around on their asses getting fat off welfare checks.  He’d beat the shit out of us if he ever thought we’d asked for anything from anybody, so we knew better than to try.  He said we had to work for everything we got, had to earn every bite we ate."  Daryl pauses again for a second, then continues, “Which was kinda funny, ‘cause the old fucker never worked a day in his life, far as I could see.” 

Rick watches, silently, as the man rubs the pad of his thumb along the now-smooth shaft of the new arrow before continuing.

“Anyway, we were pretty much always hungry; so Merle taught himself to hunt.  And then he taught me.”  Daryl glances down at the crossbow at his side and brushes his fingers over handgrip, almost unconsciously. 

“Pa had this rusty old Barnett crossbow that he’d probably stolen from somewhere or won in a bet, maybe, and Merle and I would take it out in the woods and hunt whatever we could scare up.  Squirrels, mostly.  Sometimes a possum or something else that would keep our stomachs filled for a few days longer.”  Daryl falls silent again for a moment.  Rick knows better than to say anything.  This is a eulogy, and Daryl has to get through it before he can move on.

“Merle was an asshole, but he—,” Daryl swallows, hard, before continuing, “He stuck around.  He stayed on, let Pa knock him around, long after he could’ve left.  I didn’t really see it then, but Merle—.  He waited until he thought I could take care of myself.”  Daryl pauses here to take a deep, hitching breath.  His voice is low and even when he talks again. 

“Anyway, even after he left, he would come back, now and again, to—.  To check up on me, I guess.”  Daryl’s hands are clenched around the arrow now, his knuckles white.  “Merle always left, but he _always_ came back.”  Daryl looks down at Rick; there’s kind of a desperate sheen in his eyes.  “I can’t quit thinkin’—,” he stops, takes one more uneven breath, and turns his eyes away.

After a moment, Rick reaches out, slowly, to pull the shaft out of Daryl’s agitated grip.  It’d be a shame if he broke the thing after all that work.  Rick’s thumb brushes against the side of Daryl’s hand, inadvertently, and Daryl immediately lets go of the arrow. 

The newly carved wood is silky smooth under Rick’s fingers, as he expected, and the line of the shaft is almost mathematically straight.  Rick puts it down next to Daryl’s crossbow, out of the way.  He looks up to see Daryl watching him.  For once, the man’s expression is open, unguarded.  It makes Daryl look very young, all of a sudden.

As soon as they make eye contact, Daryl slides his gaze away again.

Neither of them says anything for a long moment.  Rick finds himself looking out towards the fence at the far end prison yard.  The crowd of walkers there is getting bigger, he sees.  From this distance they look like tiny marionettes jerking on invisible strings; their slow, convulsive movements look harmless and kind of pathetic.

After a while, he hears Daryl clear his throat.  The sound makes Rick turn towards him again, and he watches Daryl’s throat move as the man swallows, opens his mouth.

“You wanna—?”  Daryl glances down at Rick’s lap, meaningfully, and then darts a quick look back up to Rick’s face. 

Rick shrugs, carefully, and then he shifts a little so that his body is angled a bit more towards Daryl.  Otherwise, he keeps himself still, keeps his limbs loose and unassuming.  This time he’s here for Daryl; he’ll give the man whatever he needs.  Rick’s done with leading, for now.  He’s done taking.

The silence stretches and Rick watches as Daryl starts to fidget a little after a while.  Rick’s suddenly aware that there’s been a kind of jerky, nervous energy coming off the man’s body ever since he’d let go of the arrow. 

Then, Daryl looks at Rick again and says, low, “You didn’t come here to hear me bitch about my Pa and whatever the fuck else.” 

Rick has to smile a little, at that, because that’s exactly what he’d come here for.  Before he can say it, though, Daryl looks towards the prison, then at the front gate of the yard, to where the Governor’s trucks will be rolling up soon enough.  He says, “I know you’re here to stop thinking about shit, too.” 

Rick feels the amusement start to falter on his face.  There’s a shift in the afternoon breeze, and suddenly Rick thinks he can smell the cloying odor of the walkers he’d just put down.  He tries to push the unease to the back of his head—tries to make himself focus on the situation at hand.  Whatever they decide to do about everything else, they’re going to need Daryl.

Rick tries to wipe the strain off his face quickly before it infects the present mood, but thankfully Daryl doesn’t even glance at him as he goes on—

“Fuck ‘em all, man.  We’ve got some time.  Just make me stop thinking for a second.”  He huffs out a half-irritated breath, and then, “Fuck, make me stop talking, at least.”

Rick’s not sure how to respond to that—Daryl’s gaze is still focused somewhere at mid-distance.  The orange glow of the late afternoon light seems to catch and hold across Daryl’s lithe body, throwing stark shadows across his form that hadn’t been there only moments before.  Daryl’s speech is easy, and his tone open, but something makes Rick hesitate.  There’s something in Daryl’s voice, or his words, that sounds—relenting.  Like he’s giving himself up to the inevitable.

It makes Rick uncomfortable, though he can’t put his finger on why, exactly.

Then, as Rick watches, Daryl shifts his hips forward and leans his body back just a little.  His eyes are dark, and he’s now looking at Rick again, expectantly. 

Logically, it seems pretty obvious by now what Daryl wants, but Rick still wavers.  He’d been all set to let Daryl take the lead and he’s not sure if this counts.  Somehow it feels like the ground had shifted underneath him while Rick was distracted by a faint waft of decaying flesh, and by the play of light through Daryl’s hair.

Heedless of Rick’s dilemma, Daryl lets his knees fall apart, just a bit.  The man’s eyes are decidedly fixed on Rick, now, and Rick can practically feel the rush of blood go southwards from his head.  He can’t help himself then—Rick swings himself forward onto his knees and his hand is suddenly on Daryl’s thigh, almost of its own accord.   

Daryl shifts his legs apart a little more at the touch, inviting.  The movement causes Rick’s hand to slide further up the inside of the man’s thigh.  Rick glances up, but Daryl’s head is tilted back now and it looks like his eyes are closed.  Daryl is sprawled back now—as much as he can be while still sitting on the tire—and the nervous energy in the man’s body from earlier has vanished like it had never been there.  Rick realizes, with a kind of wonder, that it had disappeared as soon as Rick’s hand had touched Daryl’s body.

Rick takes a breath, and then deliberately slides his hand further up Daryl’s thigh until his thumb hits the inseam of the man’s pants.  He can feel the growing hardness there, and the heat emanating from Daryl’s body.  Daryl sighs a little and spreads his knees further apart as Rick presses his hand down against the hardness.  Rick strokes him there a couple of times with just the pads of his fingers, tracing the outline of Daryl’s cock through his pants, and Daryl lets him.  Encouraged, Rick shifts closer until his shoulders are between the man’s knees, bracing them apart, then he opens up Daryl’s pants and reaches through the layers of fabric to get at Daryl’s skin.

Daryl grunts, a low sound, when Rick’s hand touches his cock.  Rick wraps his hand around the shaft and squeezes, gently.  He presses his thumb against the sensitive underside, right under the head, and it makes Daryl’s body curl up into himself a little.  The skin under his hand is velvety soft, vulnerable, and Rick suddenly realizes that this is the first time he’s actually touched Daryl’s cock.  Daryl is allowing more than he’s ever done in the past—the thought sends an urgent spasm of heat to Rick’s own crotch.  He presses the palm of his other hand against himself.

Then, without any conscious forethought, Rick leans his head down and opens his mouth, touches the flat of his tongue right where had pressed with his thumb.  He only has time to process a soft saltiness, heat, and a harsh, strangled noise coming from Daryl—before he’s unbalanced by a hard shove, out of nowhere, and all of a sudden Rick finds himself sprawled on his back, disoriented, staring up at the other man.

Daryl is standing above him now, looking strangely shocked.  Rick pushes up on his elbows, ready to be irritated, or indignant—but before he can summon up the appropriate response, Daryl has dropped to his knees between Rick’s sprawled legs and is working on opening Rick’s own pants with a kind of rough, singular determination.  Then he’s got Rick’s cock out and the feel of flesh on flesh makes all other concerns rush out of Rick’s head in one torrential flow.

Rick groans and lets himself drop back to the ground; his hands spread out to his sides and clutch at the grass.  He hears Daryl spit into his own palm and then

Daryl is jerking him, intently, with almost the same kind of focus and mathematical precision he’d used in carving his arrow.  The drying spit on Daryl’s hand isn’t quite enough lubrication, but the resulting friction—the growing heat that stays just on _this_ side of discomfort—drives the pleasure even higher, somehow.  Rick closes his eyes and—yields, lets the thrill of it wash through him.  This is supposed to be Daryl’s show, Rick tells himself—and if this is what the man wants to do, Rick is more than happy to oblige him.

There’s nothing artful or fancy in Daryl’s handling; just steady, unrelenting strokes that are deliberate, executed for maximum intensity—and Rick’s orgasm builds quickly, insistently; it’s on him before he’s really ready for it.  Rick feels the urgent tightening in his balls and then an intense rush of pleasure that brings with it that unique, delicious vacuum of mind.  He tries to hold on to that blissful emptiness for as long as he can—but it’s fleeting, as usual; elusive.  Daryl soothes him through the echoes, his hands gentle on Rick’s spasming body.

Eventually, Daryl lets go and Rick is left panting on the ground, staring up at the darkening sky.  The wispy clouds are starting to go pink with sunset. 

After a moment, Rick pushes up on his elbows again.  He feels—unmoored, somehow, like he’s suddenly lost the anchor that keeps him from drifting—but when he looks, Daryl is still there, kneeling between Rick’s legs.  Rick watches as the man leans over to the side and starts to wipe his hand off on the grass.

“What—why did you do that?” Rick asks, before he can think the better of it.  Daryl stops, looks at him with an incredulous expression.

Rick flushes a little.  “I mean—before.  I was going to—,” he gestures meaningfully at Daryl’s cock, which is still out of the man’s pants, still as stiff as it was under Rick’s hand.

Daryl doesn’t say anything, keeps doing what he was doing, completely ignoring his hard-on.  It’s kind of disconcerting, Rick thinks, how the man can dismiss such a—obvious signal from his own body. 

Rick pushes himself up higher until his weight is on his hands now, behind him, instead of his elbows.  The position incidentally draws his body nearer to Daryl’s, and suddenly it feels too close; the foot or so of air between them somehow even more intimate than what they were doing before.  Rick finds himself scooting back, inserting more space between himself and Daryl, before he fully realizes he’s doing it.

There’s a pause, more careful wiping, and then Daryl says, “I ain’t stupid.  Pa might’ve been an ignorant fuck about most things, but sometimes the old man got it right.” Daryl sighs and slowly turns his head to look at Rick again before continuing, “Some people get given a place; others have to earn it.  Keep earning it.”  His voice is low, matter-of-fact.

Rick stares at the man.  He doesn’t understand what Daryl is saying—or maybe he doesn’t _want_ to understand.  He’s aware of a slow, sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach.

Rick takes in a deep breath, lets it out.  He feels—tired. 

Rick tries to think what he should say, how he should explain—.  He doesn’t even know what he’s supposed to explain at this point; the complexity of the space between them seems unbridgeable, now, suddenly.  The silence stretches, an almost palpable thing.

Daryl doesn’t move, but Rick can practically feel the man’s body getting tense again; his expression starting to shutter.  Rick feels like he’s on the verge of failing some kind of intangible test, and—

He stops, pulls back.  He looks at Daryl, the line of the man’s collarbone, where his shirt has fallen open—the glint of the setting sun reflecting off the fine hairs on his arms.  He looks at Daryl’s lap, where the man’s hands are clenched tightly against his thighs, now; Rick can see how he’s suppressing the impulse to cover himself. 

Rick sighs, realizes he’s fucked things up; he’s somehow inserted _shame_ —or something like it—where there had been none before.  He presses the heel of his right hand to his eye, tries to figure this out before it gets even more derailed.

Maybe Rick is making things more convoluted they need to be.  All of Daryl’s many, complex layers aren’t going to be uncovered here, in the prison yard, in one afternoon—that’s patently obvious.  But maybe what Daryl actually _needs_ , right now, is a lot simpler than the torrent of ambiguities, both imagined and unimagined, getting cluttered up inside Rick’s own head.

Rick snorts a little, a kind of low, rueful sound.  Daryl’s head jerks up in surprise. 

Rick pulls himself up to his knees and puts his hands on Daryl’s shoulders, presses against them.  Daryl looks kind of wary, but lets himself be pushed back until he’s lying on the grass.  Then, Rick lowers his head and licks a stripe along the man’s collarbone, across that that elegant line that had caught his eye before.  He feels Daryl stiffen at the touch.  The man opens his mouth, makes like he’s about to protest—

“Don’t,” Rick interrupts him, “Just—just be quiet for a minute.”  He presses down on Daryl’s shoulders once more, firmly: an order to stay put.

Then Rick lowers himself down next to Daryl until he’s lying on his side, pushed up on one elbow.  He considers for a second, then puts his hand on Daryl’s chest, on top of his shirt.  Daryl’s body is still tense, but unresisting.  Slowly, Rick slides his hand down the man’s body until his fingers brush Daryl’s still half-hard cock.  Rick’s close enough that can hear the slight hitch in Daryl’s breath; and he can feel as the man’s heartbeat speeds up a little.

Rick skims just the tips of his fingers along the length at first, barely touching, and enjoys the sight of Daryl’s cock twitching and growing harder under the light handling.  But then the man shifts his hips a little and grunts—a soft, uncomfortable sound, and Rick stops his teasing.  He brings his palm up to lick it, getting it as wet as he can, and then he grabs the base of Daryl’s cock in a firm, even grip and draws his hand up, smoothly.  Daryl hisses and his body arches off the ground a little.  Rick smiles to himself and starts to stroke, rhythmically, the way he likes it himself.

It takes a minute, but Rick feels the tension start to drain out of Daryl’s body.  He can sense the change in the quality of the air around them as Daryl slowly loosens up, gives himself up to the pleasure of Rick’s touch.  Daryl’s mouth is open just a bit, and he’s panting softly now in time with Rick’s strokes.  His eyes are closed and he looks—relaxed, finally.  Something unknots in Rick’s chest.

Rick keeps up the same, steady motion with his hand, lets Daryl ride the soft waves of pleasure for as long as he can. 

Daryl is silent at the end, as expected; he arches up, once, and Rick hears a long, shaky breath rush out of him as he comes.  Rick leans back a little as he continues stroking, more softly now, and watches the as faint tremors run through the man’s body.  It’s a beautiful sight.

Then Daryl drops back, boneless.  His eyes are still closed and he’s gasping a little.  Rick can’t help himself, then, he leans forward to press one more kiss on the soft skin over Daryl’s collarbone.  This time, Daryl lets him.

Eventually, Daryl brings up a hand to push at his, softly, and Rick reluctantly lets go of Daryl’s cock.  He pushes himself up, slowly, until he’s sitting upright near the man’s sprawled legs.  He cleans off his hand as best he can and fixes pants, unhurriedly.  Throughout all this, Daryl stays on his back, still and languid on the ground.  The man’s eyes are open now, but it doesn’t seem like he’s looking at anything.

Rick sits back and enjoys the comfortable silence for a minute.  There’s a peaceful stillness in the air now; even the crickets seem to have stopped chirping for the moment. 

But—there’s something he’s got to say. 

Rick looks down, watches Daryl’s chest heave as the man inhales and exhales deeply a few times, still catching his breath. 

“Listen,” Rick starts, then pauses.  He doesn’t know how exactly to communicate this in a way that’ll make Daryl hear it, but he’s got to try. 

In the lengthening silence, Daryl pushes up on his elbows and squints down his body at Rick, waiting.

“I just—,” Rick tries again, feeling—exposed, suddenly.  He clears his throat, then forces himself to go on, “You don’t have to—keep earning it.  Your place, I mean.  Not anymore.”  Rick swallows, forces himself to keep his eyes on Daryl’s face.  The light is starting to fade as the sun drops below the treetops on the far side of the fence, but Rick can still make out Daryl’s expression clearly.

Daryl snorts a little, and his look is half wry and half unbelieving—not like he doesn’t believe what Rick’s saying, but more like he doesn’t believe _Rick_ believes it. 

Then, in one smooth motion, Daryl pushes his body up to a sitting position, drawing his legs away from Rick at the same time.  As Rick watches, Daryl fixes his clothes quickly, runs a hand through his hair, and pushes lightly to his feet.  He rolls his shoulders a little and straightens his arms out and down, hands clasped behind his back; Rick can hear the slight crack of the man’s joints as he stretches.  The last few rays of the setting sun catch on Daryl’s hair, making it shine like bronze again for a second.

Belatedly, Rick realizes he’s still kneeling on the ground, staring up at the other man, captivated.  He wets his lips and opens his mouth to say—something, but Daryl cuts him off.

“Yeah, I do,” the man says, quietly.  It takes Rick a second to realize that it’s in response to what he, Rick, had said before.  About earning a place.

Daryl keeps his eyes on Rick for a weighty moment, then shifts his gaze back towards the prison.  Rick follows Daryl’s line of sight to see the small, halting figure of Hershel just come into view from behind the edge of the prison wall. 

Hershel’s most likely out searching for them, worried, now that it’s starting to get dark.  Rick sighs, inwardly.  When he glances back up, Daryl’s steady eyes are on him again.

“And so do you,” Daryl says, after a beat.

Rick drops his head, braces his hands on his thighs—lets the truth of that settle through him for a moment.  Then, he looks back up and watches Hershel limping towards the front gate, slow and ungainly on his makeshift crutch.  Rick thinks about Carl, and Michonne, and baby Judith, and all the rest.  He thinks about how many tanks and guns the Governor must have.  He can feel Daryl’s eyes on him.

Rick sighs, gets up.

He follows Daryl back towards Hershel and the prison.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think this chapter can stand alone pretty well, so I'm using it to cross off the "Character In Distress" box on my [trope bingo card](https://kaesaria.dreamwidth.org/517.html). As always, all feedback (including constructive criticism) is greatly appreciated.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rick’s not sure if he wants to know, or even if he’s allowed, but Daryl’s not the type to pull punches in the middle of a showdown.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Takes place before the start of episode 4x01. The Governor is finally defeated and Woodbury has fallen, so the boys try to take some quiet time out for themselves.
> 
> ETA 2/28/2016: A HUGE thank you to Tierra469 for the amazing beta-read!

He takes his time, carefully sights the beaver in his crosshairs.  The animal is hunched beside the jumble of branches and mud that makes up its dam.  Its wet fur is exactly the same shade of grey-brown as the dead foliage behind it, but the camouflage is no match for the scoping technology of the Barnett Raptor FX crossbow.

He narrows his eyes and makes a minute adjustment to his aim.  The air is still around him, and the woods are silent apart from the soft rippling sounds coming from the river below.

He lets out a slow, steady breath as he releases the trigger, and—

“FUCK!”

Rick misses the beaver by about a yard and a half to the left.

A loud snort comes up from behind him, and Rick scowls.

“I toldya you should’ve brought a gun,” Daryl is saying, “Dumbass thinks he can put an arrow through a beaver on his first go.”  The man is still snickering as Rick jabs blindly back with this shoulder, vaguely hoping to knock Daryl's stupid laughing face back over the shallow riverbank.  He fails.

He watches dejectedly as the beaver, without moving from its position, blinks uninterestedly at Rick’s wayward arrow and goes back to chewing on a stick.

Rick turns around and shoves the crossbow back into Daryl’s waiting arms.

“Go ahead and show me how it’s done, then,” he says, irritated, but Daryl just throws a quick, considering look over the water before lowering the crossbow with a shrug.

“It ain’t worth it.  That beaver wouldn’t feed the two of us, let alone the whole mess of folks back home.”  He jerks his chin in the direction of the woods on the far side of the water.  “We need us a hog at least.”

Without waiting for a reply, Daryl brushes past Rick and heads upstream, eyeing the riverbank carefully.  Then, as Rick watches, the man nimbly crosses the water over the big fallen tree that makes up the backbone of the dam’s construction.  Along the way, he ducks down for a second to grab Rick’s arrow in a neat, fluid motion, before continuing on to the other side.

Rick raises his eyes to scan the woods past Daryl.  He’s not expecting anything.  The river runs pretty close to the prison fence, so this area is usually clear of walkers—any within hearing distance are drawn like moths to the groaning noise of the herd clamoring at the prison gate.

It’s mid-morning, and the sunshine pouring through the leaves above is making a pleasing pattern of light and dark spots dappling the ground and the water.  Rick can hear the soft, shushing sounds of the breeze through the branches overhead.

There’s a thriving community of live human beings back at the prison colony, waiting to cook up whatever Daryl and Rick bring back from this hunt.  Daryl had called it ‘home.’

Rick finds himself smiling, unconsciously, at the thought.  It’s a strange feeling—he doesn’t know how to relax into it.

“You comin’ or what?”  He hears Daryl’s voice drift down from the other bank.  Rick grins and heads up towards him.

~

Quite a while later in the day, they’re back at the river, though a ways upstream from earlier.  They’re both sweaty and smeared with dirt from a day spent trekking and hunting and hauling the day’s kill.  At the water’s edge, Daryl signals to stop and they lower the deer carcass to the ground between them.  There’s a little clearing here, between the edge of the woods and the riverbank—a patch of grass and some boulders and even a little bit of a rocky beach running to the waterline.  It makes a pretty picture.

Rick rubs at his shoulder, absently, where the carrying-pole had dug into his flesh.  His whole body is starting to ache some by now, and he’s tired in that pleasant way that follows a day of hard labor.

It had taken them all morning to track the family of deer—or for Daryl to track them—while Rick followed as quietly as he could behind the other man.  The only weapons they’d brought were the crossbow and a couple of hunting knives, but that had been more than enough.  Rick knows Daryl doesn’t need any help when he’s hunting; Rick had just come along to help carry the haul.  He finds his gaze drawn, again, to the familiar, solid figure of the other man.  No other reason.

Daryl is standing by the water’s edge, stretching a little, looking out over the river.  His back is to Rick and the man’s body is loose, comfortable.

Rick looks up; the mid-afternoon sun is still high in the sky, and it’s hot as hell now that the refreshing breeze of the morning has heated up to a lazy, blow-dryer-like waft.  Since they’ve stopped moving, Rick is acutely aware of the uncomfortable stickiness of the sweat-damp t-shirt clinging to his skin.  He glances thoughtfully at the lazy flow of the river, then over at Daryl, who’s still standing at its edge.

They’re not expected back until later.  It can’t hurt to clean up a bit before going on.  Rick drops his rucksack and the rest of his gear down in the grass behind him.

He walks the few steps over to the riverbank and crouches to rinse off his hands and splash some water on his face.  The water is surprisingly temperate and crystal clear, the shallows warmed by the afternoon sun beating down from a cloudless sky.  It gets darker a few yards in, though; deep enough for a swim.

Rick stands up and scans the tree line once more.  Everything’s quiet, same as it’s been all day long.

“I’m going to wash off,” Rick announces.

Daryl glances at him sidelong, then shrugs and turns back toward their pile of gear.

“Alright,” he says, “I’ll keep watch.”

Rick watches as the man moves away from him.  When he reaches the grass, Daryl drops down to the ground and pulls his crossbow onto his lap.  He starts to examine the weapon carefully, running his fingers over its grooves and limbs.  He ignores Rick.

Rick turns back to the river.  He toes off his shoes and socks and steps into the shallows.  The cool rush of liquid feels amazing against his hot, tired feet, and the soft earth underneath squishes pleasantly between his toes.  Rick pulls his shirt over his head and feels the licking heat of the sun hit his bare skin; he closes his eyes for a moment.

Reaching for his belt buckle, Rick finds his eyes sliding towards Daryl again, almost unconsciously.  The man is still sitting cross-legged by their gear, facing the woods, cleaning his equipment with single-minded concentration.  His back is turned resolutely to Rick.

Rick unbuckles his belt and pushes down his pants and underwear in one go.  He throws all his clothes in a messy pile on top of a large boulder at the river’s edge, then steps in towards the deeper part of the river.  The water stays shallow and warm for the first couple of steps, then Rick plunges down, suddenly, into dark and abrupt coldness.

After his body adjusts, the cool, cleansing water feels sensuous against his skin.  He only has to kick a little to keep his position over the lazy current of the water, and it’s astonishingly easy to just relax for a few minutes.  He feels safe, Rick realizes, suddenly, and that’s another barely-remembered sensation that feels alien against his skin.

Rick ducks his head under the water, and the whoosh of coolness is thrilling against his scalp.  Through the water, the refracted light of the sun bends and ripples in front of his eyes, and the whole world outside looks strange and wavy and unfamiliar.  After a minute, Rick comes back up, gasping, and looks automatically at the shore towards Daryl.  The man is still sitting quietly, facing away; he’s paying Rick no mind whatsoever.

That’s starting to get a little irritating.

Rick swims back to the shore and splashes up the riverbank to where his clothes are piled on the rock.  He grabs his shirt to pat himself dry, but can’t bring himself to put the sticky thing back on.  He pulls on his pants, instead, and then leans over to shake his hair out.

“Hey, watch where you’re getting that shit, man!” Rick looks up to see Daryl glaring at him, half twisted around, one arm up to shield himself from the water.  Rick grins at the man, feeling childishly satisfied and a little reckless.  He crouches down to cup a handful of water and splashes it straight at Daryl’s squinting face.

Daryl sputters and tries to shuffle away backward, ungainly and splattered.  His squinched, indignant face and wet hair make him look like a half-drowned cat.

“The water’s good,” Rick reports, grinning, then he pads over to drop down next to Daryl and shake his hair out again as obnoxiously as he can.

“Fuck off,” Daryl objects, but he only shoves at Rick good-naturedly as he stands up.

Rick finds himself smiling fondly at the other man’s back as Daryl heads towards the water, hopping a little on one foot at a time as he pulls his shoes and socks off along the way.  Rick half wants to watch the man undress—he’s never actually seen Daryl naked before—but the glare of afternoon sun is now on the other side of the water, and it shines directly into Rick’s eyes, obscuring everything.

Anyway, a clear precedent has been set.  He turns reluctantly back towards the woods.

It’s strange, this thing he has with Daryl.  Rick can’t put a label on it.  For the most part, their relationship is completely platonic—except for the two and a half times it’s been notably _not_ platonic.

Everyone assumes that he and Daryl are good friends, or close allies at least, and that beyond that, Daryl’s chief role in Rick’s life is to act as muscle when he’s needed.  And that’s exactly how they are.  They work together, joke around sometimes, and Rick absolutely trusts Daryl to do what needs to be done when shit hits the fan.  He’s the guy Rick can rely on, no matter what.  They’re like brothers.

Except for the two and half times they’ve fucked.

Rick scans the tree line again, feeling suddenly restless.  It looks exactly the same as before.  Rick stretches his legs out in front of him and leans back on his elbows, lets his head fall back, tries to relax into the heat of the sun beating down on him.  He can hear Daryl splashing around in the water behind him; it’s a nice sound.  He thinks about Daryl’s agile, naked body moving under the water.  He feels a different kind of heat start to pool, low, in his belly.

After a while, he hears Daryl coming out of the water.  He can’t help himself, Rick turns to look before he can think better of it.

Daryl has just pulled himself up onto the shallow part of the bank and his whole body is gleaming wetly in the blazing afternoon sun.  He’s only a few yards away now, and Rick can see the individual lines of the man’s whipcord muscles as they flex and shift under the glistening skin.  Rick’s eyes linger, reflexively, at Daryl’s crotch for a moment before running hungrily over the man’s chest, past cold-puckered nipples and a few inky tattoos, and up to the man’s face.

Daryl is smirking at him, one eyebrow raised in amusement.

Rick feels a rush of heat flow up his neck and more, further down.  Daryl smiles, smugly, and holds his hands open out to his sides, cocky and comfortable in his nakedness.

“See something you like?”

Rick grins back at the man, flustered and pleased and turned on at the same time.  He shifts a little, trying to relieve the growing pressure at the front of his pants.

“I don’t know,” he tries, “I might need a closer look.”  He lets his gaze drop down to Daryl’s cock again, deliberately, and a thrill runs through him when he sees that the man’s starting to get hard.  He looks back up and tries to waggle his eyebrows suggestively.

Daryl snorts, then turns around to pick up his shirt to dry off with, and—

Rick feels the muscles of his face freeze into an unnatural, rigid mask.  For a second, he doesn’t realize what he’s seeing; then the image coalesces in his head, ugly and irrefutable.  He doesn’t have time to school his features before Daryl is turning back towards him with an easy smile—

The man’s face shutters and his shoulders draw together, protectively, as he catches the expression on Rick’s face.

After an awful, awkward beat, Daryl averts his eyes and pulls his shirt on quickly, his movements uncharacteristically jerky.  Rick keeps staring, nonsensically, as Daryl reaches down to pull on his pants with the same stiff motions.  Daryl keeps his head bent, his face hidden, but Rick can see the man’s neck and ears slowly turn red under Rick’s gaze.

Daryl looks up, finally, at the incessant silence.  His eyes are expressionless.  He’s holding his pants up with one hand, but the fastenings are still undone.

“You got something to say?” Daryl asks; his voice is tight and strangely flat.

Rick opens his mouth, but nothing comes out.

In the space of a few breaths, it’s as if all the good, easy feel of the day has suddenly evaporated, and now there’s just a leaden bubble of wrongness encasing their little clearing.  Even the sunshine seems brittle, somehow, all of a sudden. 

Rick is rankled, idiotically, by the injustice of it.  His hand makes a kind of an unconscious, abortive motion, half reaching towards Daryl as if he can somehow erase the past couple of minutes with a gesture.

Daryl watches him, blankly, for a beat, and then the man’s expression grows inexplicably darker.  He makes a harsh sound under his breath; a kind of derisive, disgusted snort.

“Whatever, man. Fuck you, anyway,” Daryl spits the words out, “Go ahead and have a good long look.”  With that, Daryl turns and pulls his shirt off again with an angry, violent yank.  He stands there with his back to Rick, head bent down a little and the line of his shoulders rigid with discomfort.

Daryl’s back is decorated with tattoos, like the rest of him.  His pants are riding low, threatening to fall off now that he’s stopped holding them up, and Rick can just about see the high curves of the man’s ass and the shadowed area in between.  But that’s not what draws Rick’s horrified gaze.

Daryl’s back is covered with scars, old and angry.

There are dark, ugly stripes that crisscross over the man’s shoulders and down his back, slicing over his sides and hips, and some that disappear under the low waistband of Daryl’s pants.  Nothing but a thick leather belt could leave marks like that, Rick thinks.  He feels distant, all of a sudden, like he’s observing himself observe Daryl.

He can see the larger, darker spots that must have been made by a metal buckle slamming against fragile skin.  Scattered over and around the lashing scars are dark, roundish smears that look at first like small smudges of dirt.  Cigarette burns, supplies Rick’s mind, cool and forensic.

Most of the scars are almost completely smooth, hazed over by that blurred look of skin that’s grown and stretched around a thing over the course of years.

Daryl must have been very young when the abuse began, and it must have gone on for years.  It must have been a regular, deliberate thing that Daryl had had to endure, meted out by someone who was experienced in causing pain and who had no problem with leaving permanent marks.  Rick feels the bile rise up his throat.

Daryl is still holding himself stiffly, unnaturally still; baring his back and maybe more of himself to Rick than he has to anyone in a long time.  He’s still clutching his shirt in one clenched fist.

The silence between them feels like it’s reached a fever pitch.  Rick pushes himself up to his feet, clumsily, and forces himself to speak.

“Daryl, I…,” Rick’s voice catches in his throat and he knows the tone is wrong even before the words fully leave his mouth.  He tries to fix it, to start over; but before he can, Daryl has spun around to face him, to cut him off.  The man’s eyes are incensed, almost glowing with sudden, unaccountable anger, and his mouth is curled into an ugly sneer.

“Fuck you, man.  What?  You didn’t enjoy the view?” Daryl hurls the words at Rick like daggers.  “Quit lying, I know you did.  Man like you, it gets your pistol all cocked thinking about all the beatings I had over the years.”

Rick gapes at the man, shocked.

“What the fuck, Daryl?”  Rick’s hands go up in front of him, palms out; he’s not sure if it’s a gesture of defense or apology.  He finds himself reflexively backing up a step, but it doesn’t do any good because Daryl is advancing towards him now.  The man’s face is twisted into a dark, dangerous expression as he steps up to Rick, gets into his personal space.

“What, you saying I’m wrong?  Don’t lie to me,” he hisses, “I know what gets your rocks off.  I know how much you like to hold a man down and leave your mark.”  Daryl’s voice drops at the end, mean and dirty.

Rick feels like he’s been gut-punched; all the air leaves his lungs in one harsh gasp.  _What the fuck_ , he wants to say, again, but...  The ring of a phantom phone and the smell of cold concrete comes to Rick’s mind, unbidden, and his gut clenches again on empty air.

“Or is _that_ the problem?” Daryl is still talking, low and angry, entirely heedless of Rick’s sudden inability to breathe, “You don’t like to see another man’s marks on what’s yours?  Well, too bad, fucker. He got here a long time before you.”  Daryl is in his face now and Rick tries to step back again, but he can’t—the dead body of the deer is right behind him.  He feels cornered—physically, mentally—and frantic alarm signals start to go off in his brain.  Against all reason, Rick feels a hot thread of anger uncoil inside him.

The logical part of Rick’s brain knows that Daryl is lashing out because the man feels threatened; that he’s embarrassed or ashamed somehow.  Rick knows the anger doesn’t have anything to do with him.

But Rick’s body is programmed for only one kind of response to adrenaline these days.  Seeing the scars had begun the unraveling of the first strands of agitation in Rick’s belly, bringing to mind unwanted images of _some fucker hurting his_ —hurting Daryl.  His ire had been further stoked at the realization that this nice fucking day that he’d been enjoying had suddenly gotten all fucked up.  Now Daryl is in his face and saying things at him that are fucking unjust.

Rick doesn’t deserve this shit.

“Back off,” he hears himself grit out.  His voice sounds harsher than he’d intended.

Daryl just glares back at him for a long moment, belligerent and unyielding.  Then the man slides his eyes slowly down Rick’s body, taking in the barely-restrained violence in Rick’s stance, the way he’s leaning aggressively in towards Daryl now.

Rick makes an effort to relax his clenched fists and fails.  He draws in a breath, trying to calm down, and Daryl’s eyes snap back up to his face.  The man’s face twists into another sneer.

“Am I making you mad?  Wanna fuck me up?  Come here and show me who’s boss, then.”  Daryl drops his hands out to his sides in mock invitation, his eyes hard and angry.  He doesn’t move out of Rick’s personal space.

Rick is at his limit now; beyond it.  He brings his hands up and shoves, hard, at the center of Daryl’s chest; he wants the man out of his face.  Daryl trips over the uneven ground behind him and falls on his ass.  Rick feels an eerie sense of déjà-vu wash over him as he watches Daryl push himself up on his hands, slowly, and look up at him.  He thinks for a second that the man will get up and hit him back, but Daryl just stays there, unmoving, still half-sprawled.  He glares up at Rick with an unreadable expression, his eyes flinty and dangerous.

The air feels taut between them — heavy with challenge, or expectation.

Rick can see Daryl’s chest heaving, and the man’s shoulders are drawn back, rigid with animosity.  His pants are still, miraculously, on him, but they’ve ridden so low now that Rick can see the dark patch of hair that leads down to the man’s crotch.  He pulls his eyes back up, hastily.

When he looks back at Daryl’s face, he sees that the man has been watching him, steadily.  Daryl’s expression changes.  Now there’s a kind of meanly satisfied, knowing look in Daryl’s eyes.

Rick feels a sinking sensation in his belly, a low unease that starts to damp down the resentment that’s been clouding his vision for the past few minutes.  He swallows, uncomfortably.

“Yeah, I thought so,” Daryl says, low, his voice like velvet over gravel.  The man gazes unwaveringly at Rick for a moment; then, suddenly, Daryl’s entire body goes appallingly soft… languid.

“Come over here and fuck me up, big man.”  Daryl drops his legs open, obscenely, and sprawls back on his elbows before continuing, “You know I’m game.  Want me to beg for it?  I’ll do that too, no fucking problem.  Whatever gets your rocks off, boss.”  The man’s eyes are flat and angry, in complete dichotomy with his body language.  He stares steadily up at Rick, daring him to do—something.

Rick looks straight back, holds the man’s gaze for a long, tense moment.

A part of him wants to take Daryl up on his offer, to go over there and smack that caustically self-satisfied look off of Daryl’s face.  He feels his body lean forward a little, hostile, before he can stop it.  He watches as Daryl’s shoulders tighten inwards, almost imperceptibly, in reaction.

Rick takes in a long breath and finally succeeds in unclenching his fists.  He steps past Daryl’s form and reaches down for the man’s shirt.  He throws it in Daryl’s direction without looking at him.

“Don’t you try to make me into him,” Rick says.  He keeps his voice low, but the sound carries, clear and unequivocal, over the silence of the clearing.

He doesn’t look back to see if his words penetrate, just keeps walking until he gets to the big rock where he’d piled his own clothes.  Rick pulls on his dirty shirt and thinks about gathering up the rest of his gear.

Instead, he sits down on the rock and looks back out over the woods.  He scans the tree line, again, automatically.  He doesn’t look at where Daryl’s still sprawled on the grass clutching his shirt in his hands.

Rick lowers his head a little and rubs at his eyes, hard. He feels old again, exhausted.

~

He doesn’t know how long they stay like that, but it’s long enough for his anger and frustration to mellow into something less distinct—a vague, empty discomfort somewhere in the vicinity of his gullet.  A thing he can tamp down and ignore.  The sun’s moved a little further west and the shadows that stretch out in front of him are longer than before.

When he finally musters up the energy to look in Daryl’s direction, Rick sees that the man hasn’t moved, though he’s shifted his position a little.  Daryl’s got one knee up now, a forearm resting casually across it, and his unfocused gaze is directed past Rick and out over the water.

The late afternoon sunlight burnishes Daryl’s skin and throws stark, aesthetic shades and highlights across his bare chest and arms.  The man’s shirt is crumpled in a defiant little ball next to him.

After a moment, Daryl shifts his gaze to meet Rick’s eyes.  The man’s expression is clear now, deliberately relaxed; like his posture.

“I know you ain’t him,” Daryl states.  The words land solidly on the ground between them, both a challenge and an apology.

Rick’s gaze drops, unconsciously, to the curve of the man’s shoulder.  His eyes fall on the slight, silvery start of a scar there.  He knows it’s the leading edge of a long, dark slice that runs diagonally across Daryl’s back like a shadow.  The man’s body stays determinedly loose under Rick’s scrutiny.

“Your father, did he—?”  The words are out of Rick, a convulsion, before he can think to hold them back.

Steady silence, for a beat, and then—

“Yeah.  My Pa was the only man I ever let get away with laying a hand on me.”  Daryl holds his gaze, unwaveringly, as he says this.  There’s an expectant quality in his tone, something that feels uncomfortably like a dare.  Rick swallows, has to look away for a second.

“Did he—,” Rick tries again, but he can’t bring himself to finish that sentence.  In his mind’s eye, he can see the marks that trace low down Daryl’s back; that disappear under his waistband.

Rick’s not sure if he wants to know, or even if he’s allowed, but Daryl’s not the type to pull punches in the middle of a showdown.

“No, he never fucked me,” Daryl says, levelly, and holds Rick’s eye for another long beat.  Then the man shifts his gaze until he’s looking past Rick, out over the water again.  Daryl’s voice has a hollow ring to it as he continues, in an almost conversational tone, “I think he wanted to, though.  The fucker came close a few times, but he was mainly too drunk to follow through.”

Rick’s gut clenches again as he tries not to think about what exactly that might mean.  There’s a kind of dull, helpless rushing sound in his ears now and it’s loud enough that he almost misses the man’s next words.

“He never fucked me,” Daryl is saying again, lowly, and there’s an incongruous, faintly pleading note in there now that makes Rick’s eyes snap back up to Daryl’s face, appalled.

He realizes, with a slight lurch, that he’d been staring again at the scar on the man’s shoulder.  Daryl’s expression shutters under Rick’s gaze.  Rick watches as the man’s hand drops down from his knee and twitches a little, convulsively, towards his shirt.

“Don’t,” Rick hears himself say, his voice ringing harsh and loud in the otherwise silent air.  Daryl’s hand freezes, mid-motion, and he stares up at Rick, wary.

Rick swallows.  “Sorry,” he retracts, lamely, “I’m sorry, I don’t—”

He stops talking.  He closes his eyes and presses the heels of his hands against his eyelids, hard.  When he looks up again, he sees that Daryl has drawn both his knees up and has his arms folded up over them.  He’s still squinting warily in Rick’s direction.  Rick takes in a deep breath.

“I don’t care,” he says.  It’s the only thing he can offer.

He watches Daryl’s expression carefully; hopes, with a kind of quiet desperation, that he’s making himself understood.

Daryl just looks steadily back at him for another long, tense moment, and then—

“Whatever, man,” Daryl says, finally. “It’s no skin off my back.”  The corners of the man’s eyes crinkle a little, darkly, at his own joke.

Rick lets out the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.  He watches as Daryl lets himself relax, slowly, muscle by muscle, under Rick’s gaze.  He feels tension drain out of his own body in response.

It’s strange, this thing he has with Daryl; a weird bond built up of and amid all the things they never say to each other.  Rick can’t put a label on it, and mostly, he doesn’t want to.

The sun is starting to ride low in the sky now, and the trees are casting long, silky shadows over the water and across the space between them.  Rick glances up, briefly; he guesses they have another couple hours of light before sundown.  They should probably start heading back soon, he thinks, but he can’t bring himself to move.

The sunlight is catching on the edges of Daryl’s hair, turning the half-wet, disheveled ends into wisps of gold.  His eyes trace Daryl’s jaw and down the line of his neck, to where the taction of light and skin and bone has created a stark edge of shadow across the man’s collarbone.  Rick wants to lick his thumb and run it slowly along that elegant line, to where it dips into the hollow of the man’s throat.  He wants to run the flat of his hand over the curve of Daryl’s shoulder and down the man’s back, erasing the marks there; or maybe just memorizing them, dissolving their power.

“Why’re you always doing that?  It’s fucking strange,” Daryl says suddenly, jolting Rick out of his thoughts.  There’s no objection in Daryl’s voice, just a kind of bemused, lazy curiosity.  Rick startles a little, anyway, at the unexpected question.

“What?” he blurts, nonplussed.

Daryl shoots a quick, quizzical glance at him, then looks out over the water again.  “You stare at me,” he says, like it’s an evident thing. “You stare at me all the time, like I’m the fucking Mona Lisa or something.”

Rick is taken aback, a little; he has to think for a second.  His gaze lands, unconsciously, on the curve of Daryl’s solid, work-calloused hand, where it rests casually against the man’s lowered knee.  The dark shadows between the digits make them look elegantly long, graceful.  Rick thinks about how those hands feel against his skin.  The fingers twitch a little under his scrutiny, and he looks up to catch Daryl’s raised eyebrows and the man’s half-vindicated, half-exasperated expression.  Rick smiles at himself, caught out, and shifts his gaze away to survey the tree line as he answers.

“I guess—,” he starts carefully, then closes his mouth again.  He hesitates for a moment, wonders how honest he’s allowed to be.

“I guess I just see something I like.”  He can hear the slow, confident smile in his own voice.

When Rick finally turns his eyes to Daryl again, the man is looking back at him with that steady, familiar gaze of his.  As he watches, Daryl swallows hard; Rick can see his Adam’s apple move under the fragile skin of his throat.   Rick opens his mouth—

“Come over here and fuck me, big man,” Daryl proposes quietly, interrupting.  The words are almost identical to before, but the tone is completely different.

Daryl’s posture is relaxed, inviting; and it doesn’t change as Rick stands to move over to him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who's stuck with me through the long hiatus between chapters. Please note that I've only seen up to episode 4x05 of the show so far; hopefully the boys are still more or less in character. 
> 
> Also, sorry there's no actual sex in this chapter. I tried; I really, really did - but I just could not make it work with the flow of the story. Maybe there'll be a bonus scene later. ;)
> 
> As usual, any and all feedback is very much appreciated!

**Author's Note:**

> All feedback is hugely appreciated. You can also discuss this story (or anything else) with me on [Tumblr](http://kaesaria.tumblr.com/). **(ETA: And now also on Imzy.[Come play with me!](https://www.imzy.com/kaesaria))**


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